"Tatort" about Berlin housing market: Rental by the neck?

Fly on the curtains, larvae on the floor, there is a big whirring and crawling in the neighbor's apartment of the commissioner. For weeks Robert Karow (Matthias Waschke) lived wall to wall with a dead pensioner. When he sees his partially mummified corpse, he immediately closes the apartment as a crime scene - much to the annoyance of the landlady, who once wanted to hunt a cleaning crew through the rooms and now groaning in the face of decay scenario: "If blood and intestinal contents flowed into the screed we have a real problem. " So quickly make the place, then re-rent it for a multiple.

Welcome to the Berlin housing market. Karows colleague Nina Rubin (Meret Becker) speculated at the sight of the dead pensioner and the ambitious landlady, that perhaps someone wanted to have the less lucrative house residents from the neck. Karow: "Do you really believe in renting by the neck?" Rubin: "Who knows, old tenants, old leases, you know what's going on in Berlin's housing market today."

This "crime scene" begins with its sarcastic objections to the housing war in the capital highly topical - and leads from there skilfully into a little-lit chapter of GDR history: the practiced there until the eighties death penalty. The old man from Karow's tenement had once been sentenced to death for a threefold murder and, as files at least seem to prove, had actually been executed in 1972 in an East German prison. Can a human die twice? Is there a life after death?

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After all the dusty East German history lessons on public television, after the too simple spy thriller "Wendezeit" in the ARD and the overly didactic three-part "Preis der Freiheit" on ZDF, the "Tatort" finds a more interesting way of dealing with the DDR To employ regimes. He does this rigorously out of the here and now, with cleverly interwoven narrative levels (book: Sarah Schnier) and with characters who reveal their concerns only bit by bit.

One-man lynch mob

So we follow at the beginning of another elderly, who is beaten down by two criminal girls in his apartment and later goes with a pistol on a risky campaign against his attackers. Since the senior is played by the grandiose Otto Mellies, 88, one believes the transformation from the visually impaired old man to the one-man lynch mob. The old man was once a judge in the GDR, he comments on the attack on his person with the words: "At that time, that would not have happened since we were safe."

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Old crimes from the GDR era, new impositions on the housing market: director Florian Baxmeyer, who shot many of Bremen's experimental "crime scenes" with Sabine Postel and Oliver Mommsen, brings these two levels of meaning together confidently. In addition, he leads the two investigator figures Karow and Rubin, who often act rather side by side than with each other, in a completely kitsch-free manner.

In one of the most moving scenes, the investigator ponders a life after death. Rubin: "The time between life and death is confusing for the soul, it is separate from the past and the future, so I've learned that at least for the soul of the dead, it is comforting when the living take part, then she is not so lost. " Karow unusually emotional: "Do you do that for me when I'm no longer there?"

There are finally two found who have never searched. Happiness will not last long. Meret Becker announced in summer that it will leave the Berlin TV area. Then Karow is alone again with his dead neighbors.

Rating: 8 out of 10

"Tatort: ​​The life after death", Sunday, 20:15, ARD